Open office furniture systems are quite flexible, compared with drywall construction, with virtually all panel based office furniture systems of the prior art being capable of being erected, dismantled, and re-erected in a matter of a few hours. This is routinely done when the job description, or physical size, of a whole department changes. U.S. Pat. No. 3,762,116, which is assigned to the same assignee as the present application, is typical of such prior art panel based open office furniture systems.
When an employee's job description changes, or when an employee is assigned to a different department, the contents of the employee's work station are moved, while the work station itself remains unchanged. Packing and unpacking of the employee's belongings are time consuming, but necessary with most present office furniture systems.
Prior art specialized sub-type of systems furniture which may be erected, dismantled, and re-erected in modules, thus eliminating the necessity of packing up an employee's belongings for moving, share vertical wall divider surfaces between adjacent work stations. Thus, moving a module not only affects the person being moved, but also the person sharing the opposite wall.
It would be desirable, and it is an object of the present invention, to retain all of the advantages of prior art panel based open office furniture systems relative to flexibility, including ease in erecting, dismantling and re-erecting, while also eliminating the need in most cases to dismantle and re-erect work stations when they are moved. It would also be desirable, and it is another object of the invention, to eliminate the need to pack and unpack a person's belongings when the person's work location changes, without disturbing adjacent work stations and associated personnel.